A Journal of Latin American Criticism & Theory

Between February 17, 2025 and March 10, 2025, FORMA published weekly installments in the "State of the Field" Debate series. Scholars in the field were invited to submit responses to one or more of the position papers. Six position papers, one research article analyzing research trends at a major conference, and three responses to the position papers are published below.

Recent critical and theoretical concerns reflect the vitality and dynamism of Latin American criticism and theory in the twenty-first century. As seen over the past two decades, our field has become less monolithic, veering, instead, toward a rich amalgam of subfields that will be further consolidated in the near future. Emblematic of this amalgam model of the field is The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literary and Cultural Forms (2022), edited by Guillermina De Ferrari and Mariano Siskind.

Since 2010 there has been a surge in Latin American(ist) ecocritical studies and the environmental humanities. While building on the legacies of deconstruction and postcolonial thought, these newer lines of research take a step back from—though not abandoning by any means—the deconstructive trends of the last several decades to interrogate, instead, socioecological dynamics and the social construction of hope. This paper proposes Carolyn Fornoff’s Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (2024) as a model for how the Latin American humanities can pursue scholarship attuned to the socioecological pressures of the coming decades.

Appearing in print some twenty years ago, Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (2003) was the point of departure for research into non-normative Latin American cinema in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the intervening years, scholars have responded with a turn to affect in the analysis of cinema. This paper argues that over the next 25 years we need to critically interrogate this turn in ways that parallel recent innovative works on affect and LGBTQ cinema that remain in dialogue with Foster's foundational work on gender and sexuality in Latin America: Eugenie Brinkema's The Forms of the Affects (2014); Affect, Gender and Sexuality in Latin America (2021), edited by Cecilia Macón, Mariela Solana, and Nayla Luz Vacarezza; and Geoffrey Maguire’s Bodies of Water: Queer Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (2024).

Hegel famously wrote that “Minerva’s owl flies only at dusk.” As everyone knows, Hegel meant by this that only in retrospect can one begin to truly understand an event or topic. As we will see, the idea of knowledge as crepuscular is relevant to an understanding of The Failure of Latin America: Postcolonialism in Bad Times (2019). John Beverley’s authorship gives The Failure of Latin America added relevance: he has played a major role in (U.S.) academic criticism about Latin America during the last forty or so years. The Failure of Latin America is thus presented as a kind of intellectual testament that sums up Beverley’s political and theoretical evolution, together with that of the region as a civilizational location for social hopes from the revolutionary 1960s to our post-utopian present.

Can we continue to affirm that what we do as scholars, critics, and teachers today is defined by a set of shared and debated problems and questions, and that the totality of our academic labor is auto-regenerative in the sense of a totality that generates new ideas? My sense, admittedly based on anecdotal evidence—I am speaking of a professional intuition attuned through conversations with colleagues together with observations of conference programs, journal indices, and academic publishing lists—is that there is no such thing as a shared set of guiding questions and/or catalyzing problems today. However, Erin Graff Zivin’s 2020 monograph Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading offers a timely intervention that both registers and responds to the fraught state of Latin American literary and cultural studies today.

The geopolitical transformations that marked the end of the twentieth century, including the end of the Cold War, consolidation of neoliberalism as the dominant economic model, and attendant escalation of debates about globalization, engendered a “global” or “transnational turn.” In literary studies (particularly in the United States) this was most clearly manifest in renewed interest in the notion of world literature. From within Latin American criticism, the region's claim on world literature has proven fundamental to three key monographs tackling the intersections of Latin American writing with the expansive frameworks of world literature: Mariano Siskind’s Cosmopolitan Desires (2014), Héctor Hoyos’s Beyond Bolaño (2015), and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado’s Strategic Occidentalism (2018).

Using a quantitative approach to any aspect of culture still faces opposition from members of Spanish American literary studies, perhaps due to the complex history between data acquisition and the study of Spanish American culture, or simply because this method of studying cultural history is still associated with the so-called “distant reading” in the minds of scholars unfamiliar with the breadth and variety of Digital Humanities (DH) approaches. Quantitative approaches to the literary field are not new within Spanish American studies and one can find early versions of them in well-known essays such as Ángel Rama’s “El boom en perspectiva.” The growing use of data collection and analysis by activists in contemporary Spanish American societies—employed to counter misinformation disseminated by state bodies and to promote citizen mobilization in urban life, politics, and environmental issues—will hopefully encourage more Latin Americanists in U.S. academia to embrace DH techniques for studying history and power relations in the cultural field in ways that are not traditionally possible.

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra’s “Distant Lands and Climes: Latin American Criticism, World Literature, and Other Axes for Comparison” engages in a discussion of the relationship between Latin American literature—mainly its writers—and what has come to be understood as “World Literature” over the last twenty-five years. Armillas-Tiseyra identifies South-South readings and relations as the most promising and productive future of Latin American literature in relation to world literature. This response is to highlight and expand upon two subterranean lines of inquiry touched upon by Armillas-Tiseyra, that, in my view, constitute pressing issues for South-South intellectual engagement. The first concerns national literature and its corresponding “national” language; the second addresses anti-colonial and postcolonial alliances within South-South exchanges. At the core of both issues lies the colonial matrix of power.

An engagement with Patrick Dove’s assessment of Erin Graff Zivin’s book Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (2019) can follow the thread that guides the conclusion of her study: “Literature, or aesthetics more broadly—coupled with the possibility of thought, or thinking—emerges as the only sanctuary against or within totalitarianism.” It is the aesthetic state or sanctuary that offers a virtual site of relative freedom and equality, in which even mere “tools” and the masses may find respite from totalitarian command.

I read with interest the lucid evaluation of the tendencies of the past two decades (2005-2025) of scholarship in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies articulated by Ignacio López-Calvo in this issue of FORMA. Following the logic of López-Calvo’s “Twenty-First Century Latin American Criticism and Theory,” I propose to extend the discussion of newer critical approaches that are likely to continue to gain traction and expand their reach in the coming decades to include those incorporating an attention to community engagement. Halfway through this third decade of the new millennium, it is clear that Public Humanities projects constitute a major new tendency in Latin American Cultural Studies and affiliated Humanities fields (Literature, History, Philosophy, etc.).